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Book Diary: Gini Koch – Touched by an Alien

This book was intended as a fast and fluffy read after heroically battling my way through all of War and Peace, but as you can tell from the three novels I managed to read in the time it took me to finish this one, things did not work out that way. I really wanted to like this book, as the concept is very cute: A bunch of gorgeous, Armani-suited aliens is fighting a secret war against a horde of horrendous, over-sized other aliens, and our heroine and first-person narrator becomes involved in this conflict, falls in love with the aliens (the gorgeous ones, I should add) and fights evil (in form of the horrendous aliens). There’s a kick-ass heroine, there’s super-strong, gorgeous male aliens and super-intelligent, equally gorgeous female ones, there’s slimy monsters and lots of intentionally cheesy pulp Sci-Fi – all the ingredients for an enjoyable and funny romp, one would think – but it just tasted bland and did not work for me at all.

The problem seems to me that Gini Koch, although she comes across as a very nice person, just is not a good writer – the protagonist is just too good to be true and a clear case of auctorial wish-fulfillment, all the other characters are paper-thin, the plot has no pacing to speak of and just strings one event after another. Even comic fiction should have some kind of coherency that goes beyond a breathless iteration of “and then… and then… and then…”, some kind of story arc and, dare I say it, character development, all of which is sadly absent in Touched by an Alien. It was a real slog to get through, and probably would have ended up DNF if had not already bought the second volume in the series. I might give that a try some time and see whether Gini Koch as improved her writing skills any, but I’m not in any particularly hurry to do so.